More tenacious were the public officials – Arts Council assessors, local-authority inspectors and cultural attachés from foreign embassies – all seeking more or less the same thing: a brace of seats to the début of the decade. The only caller I failed to fob off was a willowy Eton-and-Oxford type in morning coat and striped trousers who turned up one afternoon at four as the tea-trolley trundled down the corridor, demanding to see the senior partner. ‘My name is Alexander Horneyman-ffitch, Foreign Office,’ he drawled imperiously.

‘I’m afraid Mr Simmonds is in a meeting all afternoon and cannot be disturbed,’ I replied.

‘Then I shall wait until he is free,’ said the official, shooting a crisp pair of cuffs and fractionally adjusting his pearl tie-pin as he took a vacant seat at the desk beside me. I had never seen a Foreign Office man in the flesh before. Neither, it seemed, had Rosalyn, the temporary secretary whose seat he had taken, a flute-cool economics graduate who melted beneath his supercilious stare into a fluttering skivvy, all work discarded as she scuttled down the corridor in search of a ‘suitable’ cup and saucer for our impeccable guest. Horneyman-ffitch sipped his tea through pursed lips, according her efforts the faintest of nods and addressing his next remarks to the nearest person in authority: myself.

‘Perhaps you would be good enough to advise the director of your, er, enterprise,’ he said, ‘that the Permanent Secretary is anxious to obtain a response to several letters that he has written to this address, having been unable to effect telephonic communication.’

I mumbled something about checking the files and slipped into my father’s office where he was, typically, talking away on two phones. It would have been pointless to search his desk for missing crested letters, so the moment he set down one receiver I warned him that a Foreign Office wallah was squatting on his threshold.

‘I can guess what he wants,’ smiled Father. ‘Wheel him in.’

‘So good of you to receive me, Mr Sy-monds,’ drawled the intruder, stressing the first syllable to underline its Israelite origin and the unbridgeable genetic gulf between us. ‘My master, the Permanent Secretary,’ he continued, ‘has written to you on behalf of his master, the Secretary of State, requesting tickets for a musical evening that you are organising at, if I am not mistaken, the Royal Albert Hall next Thursday. It was intimated that these tickets are required not for personal amusement – although the Secretary of State is an enthusiastic musical amateur – but for the purpose of entertaining the foreign ministers of three friendly nations who have expressed an urgent desire to attend the occasion.